Putting Norway on the map – the public domain way

Map data is an essential part of my work. Often I find myself looking for raw map data, for instance of the counties of Norway in vector format, typically shape/kml or any other geo-data format. The Norwegian Mapping Authority has of course a lot of high-quality data available, additionally several (or all) governmental institutions in Norway can join a “community” of data creators and share the data among themselves. NTNU, the university I’m at, are fortunate enough to be part of this consortium although we do not contribute to the data.

This all seems to put the necessary foundation for finding fairly standard geodata – it should be easy to find, download and use fairly freely. However, that is not the situation. The system created for accessing the data has so good security that is is in practice inaccessible. When I finally find the right person who has credentials to log in – the system for finding the correct data is packed with forms which do not have any meaningful labels or content in them – at least they are not describing what you’re actually downloading. In my quest for finding the county data for Norway I summed it up in a tweet:

Putting Norway on the map seems to be inhibited by costly licensing and non-existing accessibility (yes, you http://geonorge.no)

As you may imagine, I did not get the data I was looking for. I got some data – namely the municipality data in nice vector format, even with textual names and everything – however not the county they belong to or any other geographic meaningful information.

I admittedly gave up for a day or two. Then I started searching for alternative data – and after a while I found that the US government is far beyond the Norwegian (at least in geodata:). They have released a data set termed vmap0 which is vector data covering the whole world. The data is unfortunately in a bit inaccessible form which I didn’t care to figure out. (not that difficult it seemed, just some converting here and there). I found someone already had converted it to shape format, and nicely split up in continents. So I downloaded the data from the (seemingly) nice folks at GIS-lab.

I only needed the data covering Norway I extracted it and converted to svg (not geo), png+pngw, wgs84+utm32N and wgs84+latlon. The data is not perfect, it has a line across Norway – probably relating to the curvature of the earth – however it is “cutting” some counties and I haven’t figured out how to delete it nicely, however the data is good enough – and far better than nothing!

My frustration has finally ended – through the public domain with gratitudes to the US government! As this resolved some of my issues – I thought I’d try to resolve someone else’s by sharing alike:) You can find the vector data of Norwegian counties (fylker) in different formats and projections in the file here:

http://folk.ntnu.no/alexanno/geodata/NorgeFylker.rar

I hope you enjoy the data – remember to acknowledge GIS-Lab and the US Government if you care for it – my contributions are not necessary to acknowledge :)

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